Schwarz travel column: Take time to unplug on vacation

I come from a pretty white-bread family, having no experience with multiple moms or a couple of stepdads.

Still, there have been a multitude of men in my life who shaped my outlook. One — I call him one of my newspaper dads — was a publisher who believed in me early on and mentored my young career while proving to be a great friend to my whole family.

That man’s voice is in my head all the time. I hear almost daily his admonitions and quips about community journalism and working life that were funny because they were true.

What’s that got to do with travel? One of his chunks of wisdom comes to mind every year as desks all over the country empty in a deluge of out-of-office messages that urge coworkers to call a cellphone number if they need anything at all or be patient because this particular worker might take a few hours to respond. They’re on vacation, after all.

Even worse is the message that says the vacationer will check in regularly at 4 p.m. or noon or after the daily meeting.

His voice in my head? It says this:

“Vacations aren’t just for you to get a break from the people you work with. It’s so they can get a break from you, too.”

He’d spent a career working with people who couldn’t — correction, wouldn’t — unplug for a few days. And they were driving their coworkers nuts.

They also were proving (at least to him) that they had little confidence in the people they had hired, trained, mentored and should be able to depend upon — in short, they were selling short their own work as a manager or their co-workers’ abilities to carry on.

To him, that meant failure. Not surprisingly, the corollary to his “vacations aren’t just for you” advice was this:

“The mark of a good operation is how well it runs when you’re not there.”

Certainly, not every boss holds the same beliefs, and it’s best to test the waters before cutting the cord completely.

But his voice, and those messages, have been in my head now for better than 20 years, repeating the once-revelatory message: